Lincoln is many things to many people, but mention the name to me, this is what always comes to mind first. Well, perhaps not this particular one until now, but the Lincoln Continental of this generation is what I immediately picture, usually in black, which is why I found this one such a delight as I rounded the FoMoCo corner at my favorite Colorado junkyard.

You can keep your Mark V’s, your TownCars, your newer extremely pale imitation of what this one was even with the 80-odd quantity of new Continentals with suicide doors that are apparently all presold…figure out a way to make 80 more of these and they will sell twice as fast and probably for twice as much.

I’ll freely and happily admit I’m no walking encyclopedia of almost anything Lincoln, and until this day last week had not even realized that the hood on these opens in reverse. But now that I have seen it so (as that’s how it was posed when it pounced on my eyeballs), it’s just so right and of course that’s how it’s supposed to be, never mind that accessing the V8’s glorious 430 cubic inches (7 liters to those of you working with the more logical scale around the world) that was installed in these first few years of this generation must have been a literal stretch. In later years the engine expanded to 462 cu.in. (7.6l) and then in 1969 reduced slightly back to 460cu.in. (7.5l). The transmissions throughout the run were 3-speed automatics.

How does such a massive lump look so small? Even with a few bits missing you wouldn’t think there’d be so much space. Someone appears to have left their hanky on this one, perhaps many moons ago when it was last wheeled into the barn. Or maybe just the day before I got here. (ED: note the two barrel carb, used on ’61-’62 Contis)

It somehow looks kind of shorter than I remember/envision it, but then I realized that for its mid-cycle refresh in 1964, the wheelbase was stretched by 3″ (around 8cm) which is likely what I was thinking of. An extra 3″, some say that can make quite a difference…I also realized I’ve never opened the doors on one.

Ah, so satisfying. But yeah, that opening isn’t particularly wide, you’d almost have to form a queue to get in when leaving from wherever you are with a full load of guests.

I think I’ll skip the actual getting in this time though. But when new in 1962, it appears that a total of 27,849 people paid at least $6,074 (plus more for options) to have the privilege of getting in whenever they desired. And a few thousand more people decided they wanted their hair ruffled in the wind so they chose the convertible version instead.

That’s a mighty big wheel, the camera couldn’t get it all. Somehow the horn ring is broken off (remember those? they were great, just move your finger slightly off the rim and press down lightly). The fuel gauge is still there, I imagine it read close to zero a lot back in the day. What was on the right that’s missing here?

That center “stack” is almost foreshadowing what was to come years later. It’s not that far off from some much newer designs. And the infotainment system is right up top, gee, it almost looks tacked on, like a, oh, I don’t know, a book laying on its side or something!

I think Elwood Engel did a wonderful job with this, and I really love the little details, such as the grille and the patterned panel across the rear between the lights.

It just screams “America” from this angle. How many bodies fit into this trunk? It’s huge.

This has to be one of those cars that someone was going to get to “someday”. Sadly I’d guess the owner ran out of time before someday occurred.

The color is denoted by the code letter “T” which means it’s Champagne, a fitting color for this car that would be the toast of many collections, including this current, final collection. Also, mind you, a color I’ve never seen one in and I find it to look extremely attractive in this shade with much less gravitas than the typical black. Built in Wixom, Michigan as one of almost 7 million vehicles across many Lincoln models along with Thunderbirds and even the GT40 as well as the revived GT before the plant shut down in 2007.

She’ll live out her days in relative silence here on the lot until eventually even that comes to an end in a few months; at least she gets pride of place at the end of the row to watch those coming in down the center aisle and perhaps giving of herself so another can live. I like modern cars as much as the next guy (and perhaps more than some here) but in this case even I have to say that they don’t make them like they used to. May this one Rest in Peace.

86 Comments

What’s the deal with the hood opening that stops almost a foot shy of the fenders (most visible in the second to last photo)? How are you supposed to get to anything hidden underneath it? Or was that space simply not used?

Whatever may be underneath there you could access through the wheelwells. Looks can be deceiving, everything you can typically access under hood of a car from this era is accessible from under the hood of these. No point having the hood extend all the way to the outer flanks, there’d just be more unibody apron structure to behold.

That makes sense – Lincoln didn’t have computers to help design the unibody and I’m sure these weigh more than they would have, and aren’t as rigid as would be possible with modern tools. They were heavy even by 1962 standards.

Underhood room in those Wixom unit bodies (Lincoln and Thunderbird) was really sparse. And the under-fender room was all wasted because an inner fender liner kept you from getting at anything under there without a bunch of work.

Agreed. Underhood access with these cars was a bitch. I was amazed when I first looked into the engine compartment of a ’61 TBird as little kid. It was just jammed.And the mechanic who was working on it at the Ford dealer was none too happy about it.

The contrast to cars from the 50s, which mostly still had higher hood lines, was very stark (and painful).

Champagne? It looks like flat champagne to me. Those slightly pinkish beiges were really popular in the early 60s. It looks like someone tried to update the car’s looks a bit with that gold respray.

The thing missing from the dash would be the clock. And this would have been an air conditioned car. I love how the FoMoCo a/c system in Lincolns and Thunderbirds were kind of like a big window air conditioner with one single big vent cluster in the middle of the dash.

There must have been some kind of economy kick in luxury cars of the early 60s. I remember being surprised to find that the 413 in my 64 Imperial came with a 2 bbl carb and a single exhaust.

I remember being surprised to find that the 413 in my 64 Imperial came with a 2 bbl carb and a single exhaust.

I would be too, since a four barrel carb was standard! I’ve never heard of a two barrel 413.

As far as I know, the Conti 430 in ’61-’62 (correction: ’60-’62) was the only two barrel big luxury car engine since the early-mid 50s. It was a direct response to the negative reaction to big thirsty cars that started in 1958 and which I’ve talked about relentlessly here.

I guess my memory is faulty on that one. I must be remembering the single exhaust which, as I think about it, was also how my 63 Cadillac was equipped. I don’t think I have ever owned a car with a true dual exhaust system.

There were a couple of metallic goldish colors there (Desert Frost and Castillian Gold) but “Champaigne” looks like a garden variety beige. If you click on one of the paint codes it shows that Lincoln changed the name to Nassau Beige in 1963 and Ford called it Sandshell Beige both years.

Every once in awhile I see a color name that leaves me scratching my head. 1962 Lincoln (and Mercury) “Champagne” looks like nothing I would ever want to drink.

Wow that looks nothing like either of the visible colors on the subject vehicle. The gold is metallic (but has lost its gloss) and the white is a dirty white, almost a very light putty color. Neither looks like that Sandshell Beige truck your site links to…

Jason Shafer

Posted May 16, 2019 at 2:45 PM

The color Ford called champagne evolved by 1963, when my champagne colored Ford was built (yeah, I was curious about how things may have changed). The website Jim links has a different color number for this Lincoln (M1453) than for the same named color in 1963 (M1459).

Jim Klein

Posted May 16, 2019 at 3:57 PM

Interesting. When you Google it and see the images of the color charts from the paint company (Ditzler?), the Champagne color looks pretty much like the subject car. More than the truck example so your explanation of the color evolving makes sense.

I think the “Champagne” is what you are seeing as white. A look under the hood shows a light beige from where I sit. The link at the bottom of the page brought up this car, which is identified as being “champagne beige”. This looks a lot what that original color seems to have been once upon a time.

I can’t come to terms with the stupidity and selfishness of the former owner or (.likely)their descendants for dumping this off at a U pull lot for what? $250?

Yes, it would cost a lot to professionally restore, but there isn’t a spec of rust on the thing, and ignoring bodywork it wouldn’t cost a lot to merely get it mobile again, and in this day and age where “patina” is a thing the body condition is more than acceptable when the body style itself is one of the most iconic of the 60s. It’s sad but understandable if this were a 1972 Continental in similar condition sitting here, but those are hard sells, a 62 is not a car that would not take long to find a buyer for what the yard paid for it.

This is in a fairly rural area, most likely someone either inherited a property with a barn and this inside it or purchased it that way and the most important thing was to either start making the property habitable or get on with life and not deal with multiple callers wanting to quiz the new owner about the Lincoln or come out and kick the flat tires and waste a ton of time. For all we know, maybe the owner DID advertise it and nobody wanted it. For the vast majority of people it’s just an eyesore and a problem, $250 or $400 or whatever they got for it at the yard is probably barely compensation for the hassle of getting it there.

When I bought that foreclosure investment property that had a Dodge Pickup in the sideyard a few years ago a few people here were surprised that I didn’t want the truck or didn’t want to deal with getting it replacement titled and sold etc. The reality is that at the time the priority was to get the house fixed and sold, any return from the truck would have been a pittance in comparison to the property and a huge time-suck dealing with the state as opposed to reporting it as an abandoned vehicle and having the city tow it away at no charge.

I mean, I do understand your point, but I completely see the other side as well. To most people it’s just an old car that doesn’t run.

That makes sense, in my area there’s enough legitimate interest to grab up a car like this for that value in a snap , but I hadn’t considered a rural area where interested people would need to take hundreds of mile trips to sometimes just tire kick.

Yeah it’s about an hour or a bit more from Denver which, while a large city and not “hundreds of miles away”, isn’t anything like the Chicago area etc. After Denver though there isn’t much in the way of big cities for quite some time in any direction.

But Dean Edwards posted a bunch of even better specimens below in his neck of the woods which isn’t all that far from you…maybe you can get a trailer and make a trip! 🙂

The state olive in, actively discourages you from getting a title on an old car… (think $5000 bond to get a provisional title, on a car I was about to buy for $800….) the Lincoln could have been in a situation like that, a replacement title could have cost more than the car in some places.

There’s no easy fix. The level of spam that we get is a constant barrage. It’s escalated drastically in the past year or two. It used to just be occasional. We get comments like this every minute or two. Hundreds per day. Happy reading:

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Would you like to read more? I could give you access to our Spam folder?

I understand why there’s a spam filter, but there’s been no explanation about what specifically triggers a comment getting sent to it, is it spacing paragraphs? Certain punctuation characters? Sometimes it seems like a comment will disappear if someone else comments at the same time? None of my posts that got inexplicably get dumped in the spam folder resemble the examples you posted, so I don’t know what it is exactly that we should avoid.

It has literally become a 50/50 chance of comments disappearing after submission, so I don’t mean to be curt but that’s apparently the best chance a comment gets through now.

Matt, do you log into the website before making comments? I have never had this happen either. I always log in first and then open a second window for viewing the public face of the site, and do much of my commenting that way.

la673

Posted May 16, 2019 at 4:03 PM

I’m not registered – I tried a few times but I’m not getting the email from wordpress. I haven’t tried yet with non-Outlook email accounts.

Sometimes it will let me post the identical comment in a different place, but anything I try to post as a follow-up to a particular comment is flagged as spam.

Another oddity is how about 40% of the time I’m not given the 15 minutes to edit the comment.

I’m definitely logged in any time I post, but I check the remember me box so it’s automatic. If that’s the trouble, great, I’ll just keep that unchecked and log in manually.

LA673, I noticed the same thing. It’s a futile exercise copy/pasting to the same comment it got flagged from in the first place(which is literally spam the filter is smart enough to catch), but I have had success putting it elsewhere where pertinent, or even changing a few words around.

To me I feel like it might be a glitch in the comment system where the comment submits twice somehow, and gets treated as spam. When it happens I know right away when I click post comment – if the page refreshes and immediately auto scrolls down into comments, the comment went through, if the page refreshes and just stays up in the article header, it got eaten.

la673

Posted May 16, 2019 at 11:24 PM

I *have* noticed though that if you get the “slow down” message and use the browser’s back button and re-enter (ctrl-v paste) the same thing again, it usually works the second time. But if I use the go back button in WordPress and then reenter it, it (or anything similar) will forever be marked as spam.

I get something different with the disappearing posts – the page refreshes very quickly. That’s how I know it didn’t work.

The spam filter of course shouldn’t allow double posts, and I also have found changing it around slightly will stop incorrect spam flags. One time in one of the house/real estate features, I posted something that got marked as spam; I looked closely at it and realized it has some of my real estate investment experience/advise that a spam filter likely thought was a “make m0ney from home” spambot

You can try the Bad Behavior plugin. Old and untested but worked well when I allowed comments. Or see if the Shield plugin offers something for it. Are you running Wordfence? If not that can be configured to block troublesome IP’s.

EDIT, also Spam Karma, which I think has to be downloaded from a Google Code page and hand installed. Still on some of my sites, but I don’t allow comments so not sure how well it works. The prop. of it gave up when spammers kept threatening him.

That’s all a bit over my head, I’m afraid. Unfortunately I don’t have the time or inclination to deal with the tech issues here.

Frankster

Posted May 18, 2019 at 9:16 PM

So, it’s not just me? I’ve taken my time to write out what I want to say sometimes, like half an hour or so, only to see Akismet deep six my comments. It can be infuriating.
I must say, if this “reading material” spam is happening on a near constant basis, I’m very concerned for the web as a whole. What are they trying to accomplish? Clogging and chaos on affected sites? Ransom and extortion, like an old time protection racket? There would seem to be a reason for it.
I actually went to the Akismet site once to find what I was doing wrong. Was I being disagreeable or rude? I didn’t think so. Turns out it seems their algorithms do search for such malicious banter. Perhaps my comments were too long. I tried keep it short and not go off on tangents. I don’t know. I couldn’t even send an email to the moderator (Paul?). But they did state once you’re “flagged”, you’re on a list, and they watch for username, IP address, or whatever. Within a few hours to few weeks, it will eventually forget you. Which is why I don’t visit for a spell, sometimes.
I will say I don’t know if I’m registered with CC or not; but I never sign in, I just go to the site, read, and comment, if so inclined. I’m also on smartphone 99% of the time; which is why I’ve never attempted to contribute, though I’d like to. I don’t know if it’s possible without a proper computer.

Elwood Englel was well known for the “hat section” body style. This is where the roof was set on the car body. He later brought this to Chrysler. This was never my favorite. I thought Bill Mitchel was better with the roof/ body style (the Toronado and other GM cars comes to mind) . But some really cool cars like the ’68 to ’70 Charger come to mind.
I do hope someone gets this at least for parts. Often I see cars meet their doom because the people who want them are not aware of them. A Honda Civic SI comes to mind with me now. https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/12/auction-to-crusher-12-weeks-in-the-lives-of-two-cars-at-a-self-service-wrecking-yard/
Bob

Although not bad, I always thought the ’64-66 Imperial was an inferior knock off of the ’61 Continental and others, though Engel had to work with the 1957 hard points and the by-then-obsolete fishbowl windshield. I thought the split grille (until ’66) and rear treatment (also toned down in ’66) were overdone. The 1965 New Yorker was much more attractive than the Imp and maybe on a par with the Conti.

Was it that unusual for cars to last for more than 99,999 miles in this era? I’ve never understood why odometers didn’t go to 6 digits plus tenths until well into the 80s since most of the cars I drove before then turned over their odometers.

Taken out of context this car is a beautiful, mostly simple design that I find pleasing to look at.

Taken *in* context, however, this particular model (well, the ’61) was THE specific car that jammed on the brakes of the overwrought luxury cars that preceded it. No Continental kit, no oversized, over-decorated bullet bumpers, not a lot of chrome at all.

Not that the overwrought luxury cars that preceded the Conti didn’t have their place, but we owe Engel a great debt of gratitude for putting a stop to it.

It’s interesting how much the Mustang dash aped cues from these, especially the wood appliqué 69-70s. Now a days with the Mustang brand being so proliphic I bet a number of casual observers might think the inverse.

My Dad’s ’63 had the brushed stainless finish, like the instruments, instead of the wood veneer. It was o the door panels also. That ’63 was a great looking car! Such a radical difference from the Cadillac or Imperial. It is a shame to see these cars in the wrecking yard but trying to redo the interior is a huge expense. That alone would be enough to discourage almost anyone. I’ve got an old luxury car that I hope to fix up, but who knows? Right now I’m just content to hold onto it for as long as I can.

The lack of rust on the featured example is what gets my dander up, this one while a sad site at least is most presumably a rust bucket, in fact it would probably be a parts good doner to fix up the feature car.

I don’t think 4 doors matter with these like other 60s cars, suicide doors trump coupes.

NADA guides list Average Retail on these as $10,950, High Retail as $34,800.

Given the complexity, the lack of available restoration parts, and the relatively low value of the completed car, it’s not surprising one as far gone as this would be scrapped. Having owned several of these as DDs back in the 70s, I wouldn’t want to tackle trying to revive just the wiring.

Lincoln should have made up their mind at the time on what their logo was supposed to look like – the elongated stretch version in the fuel gauge, or the squarer version seen on the exterior. I would have preferred the square one, to me the elongated one, while it looks fine on the fuel gauge, when I see one on a modern Linc it somehow looks like it has been turned 90 degrees, and is supposed to be horizontally oriented.

Memory escapes me seeing one of these in the wild. It must be thirty or forty years.

I typically don’t like junkyard posts, they just depress me. But, I like these cars greatly. The styling on these cars was just phenomenal. I’m surprised that FoMoCo has never truly tried to capitalize on these, by making another car in the same vein. I know there was an SUV that had a grille similarly styled as these, but nothing that ever approached the total package.

Growing up, a neighbor had one of these in white with a blue interior. It was surprisingly rust free for a then 10 year old car in Northeast Ohio. He drove that car until about 1978 or so. By then, he was old enough to retire and move to Florida. I don’t know whatever became of that car, but whoever got it, got a well maintained old car.

I get what you mean about it being depressing but I look at it as that there are still some of these and any other junkyard car out and about and often it is precisely those junkyard cars that enable the others to still be on the road.

If there were no junkyards and the day a car stopped running it was scooped up and crushed, then many of its mates on the roads would not be able to be kept running or repaired affordably either etc…Very much like organ donors really.

Poindexter and Dean, The ’62s wood trim was real. Paul, the ’58-’59 430s had 4bbls, 375 and 350 HP respectively. The ’60 through ’63 had 2bbls, 315-300 HP. Just replacing the 2bbl with a 4bbl (’63 manifold) on my ’60 gained 50 HP and 93 ft/lbs of torque (dynoed).

I’ve loved these cars since i first saw the 61 at a fall 1960 auto show when I was 10 years old. Although it looks big today, it was over a foot shorter than the 1960 Continental that my mother’s friend owned.

The 1962 model in this video – still in the hands of the family of the original owner – has had a much better fate than Jim’s subject car. It appears to have inspired a career.

Man, it’s bad enough seeing one of these in a junkyard, but I’ve run against them in the Old Iron/Full Size V8 class in my local demo derby circuit. As Mr. Klein mentioned in an above comment, I too live in a very rural area of VA where most of the points made in the comment prove true. NPR gets most of my unwanted “classics” as donations as trying to sell/make a move on them is tedious. Especially because of the nickel and dime tire kickers.

FWIW these Lincolns make great derby cars in their respective class. Drop in a Chevy 350/350 combo and run wide open. Usually they are the last car running, and average 7 plus 20 minute heats before the body is beyond usable. Hard cars.

I just don’t have it in me to run one no matter how far the car is gone as a resto, etc….